Dimebag Bandits

by Craig Furchtenicht

  Todd nudged him from the left and pointed excitedly to the sign. He said something that Kori could not hear. His ears were still numb from the long ride into town, thanks to Soup's insistence on playing his stereo system at a deafening level. The poorly installed speaker's had mercifully cut out a dozen blocks back when the Impala's tires found a deep pothole in the street, but the residual ringing in everyone's ears lingered. Kori bent his head to take another look at the sign. It was partially blocked from his vision by the rear view mirror. He leaned toward Todd and asked, “What’d you say?”

  Little Chris, who was in some unwholesome way related to Soup, apparently thought the question was directed at him. He was a perplexed looking little guy with greasy hair and bad teeth. The rotten tooth smell assaulted Kori's nose. It made him want to gag, but he did not want to seem impolite.

  “I said”, Chris started out in a tone much higher than necessary. He is as deaf as I am, Kori thought to himself as he held his breath. The tooth smell even burned his eyes. “What the hell kind of name is Glory Hole, anyways?”

  He was not just asking Todd, but anyone in the car who was listening. For a few seconds no one said a thing. They all just stared at him and tried to let the question register in their minds. It was easy for them to forget just how dense Chris was at times. It was a reaction that he was used to and did not seem to notice. Todd leaned across to meet him face to face.

  “You really don't know what that means, man?” Todd cocked his head and gave Kori a wink. Suddenly more uncomfortable than ever, Kori returned a blank expression and tried to shrink away. It was impossible to do so while stuck between the two of them. There was only one thing more humiliating than sitting in a car full of dudes, parked in front of a gay bar. That was somehow knowing exactly what the bar's lewd name was referring to.

  “I wouldn't have asked if I knew, asshole.” Chris bristled up and shot a nervous glance at Soup for support. Soup fumbled for something in his front shirt pocket, ignoring them both. Chris saw that he was going to get no help from the front row and slumped down in his seat. Kori, who had been holding his breath for record time, let his lungs loose and tried to take in cleaner air. An exercise in futility, that was. The rotten tooth smell lingered like an invisible cloud. Chris stared at his hands and began to wring them uncontrollably. He solemnly looked at Todd. “Do you know?”

  In the front seat Brenden and Soup chuckled to themselves. They could only guess how this was going to go. Knowing Todd, it was definitely going to be entertaining. Despite his rough exterior, Todd was one of the funniest guys that they knew. He looked around to the others in the car with a serious look on his face. Then he focused his attention on Chris and proceeded to give an encyclopedia worthy description of a glory hole.

  “You know the rooms in the back of the adult bookstore, where the perverts pay to watch dirty movies by the minute for tokens?” Todd began to explain. Chris nodded in agreement but his blank expression left Kori wondering just how much he really comprehended. He also wondered how in the hell Todd managed to keep a straight face during all of this.

  Kori still had no idea why they were even there. Todd's graphic description made him more uncomfortable by the minute. He self-consciously looked down at his lap just to avoid making eye contact with anyone. The neon sign and lights turned the interior of the car into something that resembled the innards of an Easter basket. His khakis looked grossly psychedelic. He thought of a Gap ad parody that he had once seen. Even Hitler would not be caught dead in these pants.

  The lecture continued: “The movies are void of any fillers or plot lines.” Todd stopped to make sure that his captive audience was keeping up. When he was satisfied that his slow minded pupil was still breathing he proceeded with the demeanor of a college professor. “The lesser known fact about these beat off booths is that there is...”

  In the front seat Soup produced a small folded bit of paper from his pocket. He pulled a piece of tin foil from under the visor and folded it down the middle. In the center crease he poured a bit of white powder from the paper and then deftly folded the bundle back into its original shape with one hand. Kori watched all of this with a fascination usually reserved for car wrecks and fist fights. Soup waved a flame under the foil until a thick smoke rose up. Most of the smoke was immediately sucked in through a short straw between Soup's lips. The rest floated throughout the inside of the car.

  Kori held his breath again as the second hand smoke drifted to the backseat. When he could not hold it any more he breathed in deeply. The air tasted sour and laden with chemicals. 'I'm going to die before I even get out of this car', he thought to himself. His heart began to beat unusually fast. 'Oh God, I think I'm high!'

  Soup passed the still smoking fold of tinfoil over the front seat headrest. Todd stopped talking long enough to retrieve it. He held his left palm beneath the rig and carefully drew it to himself. Soup held out the straw and Todd took this with much less care but with equal enthusiasm. Kori saw that the straw was actually a shortened down section of a disposable ink pen. He watched as Todd moved the flame back and forth, never letting the flame come into direct contact with the aluminum. The residue began to bubble and smoke. Todd killed the flame and sucked the vapors deeply into his lungs until most of the smoke was gone. His face became slightly flushed and beads of sweat formed on his upper lip as he held it in.

  Kori felt Chris tense up beside him. His narrow eyes were fully focused not on Todd but on the foil. He licked his lips and began to breathe heavily. It made Kori think of a man stranded in a desert, watching his buddy drink the last swallow from the canteen. Todd exhaled and passed the foil to Chris, who snatched it up greedily.

  “There even any left?” he whined. He flicked a lighter to answer his own question.

  “Fuck if I know.” Todd replied, staring out the window at nothing. His voice was slightly shaky now. He turned back to Chris, who was practically setting himself on fire to get a decent hit from the meager leftovers. “So, where was I? Oh yeah.”

  “What most people don't know about these places is that the owners cut the holes in the partitions that separate one booth from another.” His voice dropped to a whisper as if he were telling some long forgotten secret. Chris leaned across Kori's body once again, straining to hear him. “It's from these holes that the pervs are able to blow or be blown by the guy in the next booth. It gives the pervs a way of getting off while remaining anonymous. All of the glory without the hassle.” He sat up and grinned at everyone in the car. “Hence, the name glory hole.”

  To drive this bit of useless trivia home, Todd reached out and roughly shoved Chris' head down into Kori's lap. This sent Chris into a fit of blind rage and he lunged across the seat at Todd. He planted a bony knee into the fleshy part of Kori's thigh as he swung wildly at Todd's face. Kori yelped in pain and drove an elbow into Chris, sweeping him back to his own side of the backseat. Chris slammed his head hard against the door.

  Brenden spun around and screamed, “Knock it off!” These were the first words that he had spoken since they had left Cedar Ridge. His voice was harsh and full of anger. Everyone collected themselves in a hurry, knowing full well that it was not a good idea to piss him off any further. He always got uptight right before they went to work. Brenden was all about the business.

  He did not mind that the three tweakers insisted on smoking their dope right before the night's work was about to begin. In fact, he expected it. They had been speeding it up all day and the last thing that he needed was for them to start coming down right in the middle of a job. What he did insist on was a complete respect for the seriousness of the task at hand. He was not about to get locked up or worse killed, because the jackasses he was working with could not keep their shit together.

  He rarely indulged in the act of chemical enlightenment, aside from the occasional beer or joint. However, he was familiar enough with his colleagues’ addictions to know how to manage them. They could get a high as they wanted as long as they res
pected the work. If it took cracking a few of their skulls to get the end result, so be it. Even Soup, who was built like a brick shit house and as crazy as the rat who lived inside of it, cowered down to Brenden when he was angry.

  St. Brenden, the patron saint of junkies and sneak thieves. Kori sat back with his head spinning from the contact buzz. He stared at the brother he barely knew with fear and wonderment. He was not sure what he was letting himself get dragged into, but for some odd reason he was steadily beginning to care less about the consequences.

  “All right”, Brenden snapped. “Do you dope heads think that you can put that crap down for a minute? Or should we just sit here with our thumbs in our asses and watch while the fucking bar closes? Do you guys want to smoke up all night or do you want to make some money? 'Cause we can just head right back to the Ridge right now if you all want.” He looked around the vehicle at no one in particular, getting no response and not expecting one.

  Chris stared at the burnt foil for a minute and then reluctantly crumbled it up. He stuffed it in his pants pocket along with the section of pen. He rubbed the place on his head that had connected with the car door then studied his fingers for signs of bleeding.

  “Okay, everyone knows the drill?” No response from the cheap seats, just a lot of lip smacking and throats clearing. Kori had no clue what the drill was but did not dare to mention this. He was still trying to figure out why he was even asked to ride along. “We make sure that the Queen is here. We'll text you before you even get close to his place and you check back when you get there. If anything goes hinky send a text, otherwise pick us up in an hour.”

  Brenden had gone over the plan at least a dozen times before, but no one dared to complain. They accepted his obsessive micro-managing, just as he overlooked their chronic drug use. Although they hunted the same prey, their bounty was very different. Brenden's was a monetary gain and theirs was a chance to score copious amounts of free dope.

  “Cool?” Brenden looked around the car.

  “Too cool for school, dude,” Soup chimed in. He may have been wired to the gills, but he knew his part well. He was a necessary factor in pulling this off and both he and Brenden knew this. He turned to look at Chris, who was still rubbing the bump on his scalp. “You ready, Cuz?”

  “He better be,” Brenden interjected harshly. The colorful lights of the neon sign made his blonde hair glow like an eerie sort of halo as he turned his body around to face Chris. The little guy tried to shrink as far back into the seat as he could get. Not wanting to meet Brenden's cold stare, he nervously glanced at Soup for support once again. This time Soup had his back.

  “Give him a break, man. You've been on his ass all night. He knows what he's gotta do.” Soup gave Chris a reassuring wink. He cautiously slapped the back of his hand against Brenden's shoulder. “Chill out, dude.”

  “I'll chill when this is done,” Brenden muttered. The tone of his voice softened but his eyes never left Chris. “And there better be as much shit as you say there is, too.” Chris opened his mouth to respond but Brenden did not give him a chance. He turned to Kori and grinned. “You ready for your first day on the job, little brother? Our first date together and I'm taking you to the gay bar.”

  Everyone had a good laugh at this as Brenden exited the car. Todd quickly jumped out and ran around to claim the newly vacated seat, calling “shotgun!” as he went. Chris fumbled unsuccessfully for the door handle, cursing under his breath in defeat. Kori drove the ball of his fist into Chris's thigh, hoping to leave it as sore as Chris had made his following his earlier tantrum.

  “Keep my seat warm, dickhead!” He jumped through the open door and slammed it shut before Chris could retaliate. The door came within inches of making contact with the top of Chris's head as he lunged after him.

  Soup Campbell shifted the Impala into gear, leaving the Woodson brothers to bask in the alternating layers of darkness and flashing neon lights. The sign above the door pulsed almost in time with the dull thud of the bass beat that seeped from the club's walls. From the open parking lot they could faintly hear the constant chattering and laughter of what seemed like a hundred voices.

  “Don't start any fights here,” Brenden joked as they walked to the doorway. “I don't want to get my ass beat at no gay bar.”

  Kori laughed nervously. “I wasn't planning on it.”

  The doorman was easily over six and a half feet tall, dressed only in leather shorts and a neck tie. He smiled at Kori and motioned them in. For the first time that night, Kori really began to realize the gravity of the situation. What had started out as a bad feeling as they turned down that dark street had fully evolved into full on terror as they began the descent down the even darker stairwell.

  Chapter 7

  “What did you say?” Deputy Dale Scheck mumbled. The residual fog of half sleep was slow to lift. It coated his mind and his vocal chords, making him sound as if he were speaking from the inside of a barrel. He hated the evening shift almost as much as he hated his partner.

  He had been caught outright, daydreaming again. It was beginning to turn into a bad habit with him and that was not good. In most professions nodding off on the job would land a guy in the office for a well-deserved ass chewing. In his line of work it could get him killed. He hoped that Butch had not yet noticed the pattern developing. Knowing Butch, that was not likely.

  Butch did not answer him. He just gave him a disgusted look and kept driving down the road. That was how the dynamic of their partnership worked. Butch did all of the driving and most of the talking. Dale sat back and took it all in. It was not as if he had a choice anyhow. Butch took the liberty of doing all of the navigating as well. He tended to stick to the rural roads for some reason.

  The daydreaming seemed to occur more frequently as they patrolled this particular stretch of Quarry Road. It was a peaceful ride with the rumble of gravel under the tires. The seemingly endless blur of timber and cornfields were hypnotizing. The occasional turkey or whitetail deer would break up the monotony from time to time. Quarry road ran parallel with the river for a while, mirroring nearly every bend in the water's current. They rounded the last S-curve and headed up the hill toward the tiny burg of Cedar Ridge.

  The serenity vanished as they crossed a bridge that spanned a wide creek. There were no signs posted but it was known to the locals as Widow's Creek. Many bad happenings went down near that bridge over the years. Some of them were by accident, many others not so much. Dale always remembered it as the place where Stu Fisher took his beating.

  It was at the hands of the Collins brothers and it was one hell of an ass whooping. One that would leave poor Stu with two surgically fused vertebrae and a permanent limp. A routine traffic stop near the end of his shift panned out to be Stuart Fisher's last day as a Catalpa County sheriff's deputy. It was a bitter sweet time for Dale and he could not help but to feel some sense of guilt every time he dressed for work each day. After all, it was the untimely end to Stu's career that landed him the position. Otherwise, he would still be biding his time at dead end jobs while he impatiently waited for an opening on the department's roster.

  When he did get the call Dale was reluctant to accept it. How could he possibly replace the man who had selflessly mentored him throughout his young adulthood? The man who had always been there to watch him wrestle after his own father had passed away during his freshman year. In fact, it was Stu who had come to his house the night Harold Scheck had been forced into a bridge embankment on Interstate 80 by a drunk driver. Stu insisted on personally delivering the horrible news so that his mother did not have to hear it over the phone.

  It did not seem right to take over a man's job that way. Not on merit but simply by default. The stitches from the last surgery were not even out yet and they wanted Dale to try and fill his shoes? He had dreamed of getting on the force for years, but not like that.

  He had gone to the Stu's house with the job offer in hand, more for peace of mind than advice. He wanted to hear it fr
om the man himself. That it was okay to sign on to a job that had unfairly been taken from him. What he got was more than he had bargained for.

  “Christ, kid. What the hell are you wasting your time asking me for?” Stu bellowed, wincing a little as he braced himself in the wicker patio chair. He reached for the glass of iced tea that Margaret had brought out. “You've been waiting for this for a long time.”

  “Well,” Dale replied, pretending to mull over the question. He was ashamed to admit that he could actually calculate the time that he had waited down to the exact day. “I guess it's been about couple of years now, Stu... but.”

  “But, hell! What's stopping you, boy? Guilt? Pity?” He placed the glass back down on the cork coaster and wiped the wet off on his pant leg. The expression on his face grew very stern. “Don't feel sorry for me, kiddo. I'm the one that should be feeling sorry for you. That job ain't so easy. Prob'ly get stuck riding with that prick Tassler. They do that now since... well you know.”

  Dale nodded his head. Yeah, Stu. We all know.

  “You'll see a lot of things that'll stick in your head long after you hang it up for the night. I'll tell you right now that no soap and water can wash away some kinds of dirt.” He unconsciously rubbed his palm across the leg of his pants once again. “I remember a few times wanting to hang it up and walk away. Get myself an honest job that didn't make the wife sick with worry every time I stepped out the front door. But then I'd think about Gabby. The day she... the day she didn't make it home. It made the job bearable. Made it worth doing is what I guess I'm getting at.”